Phoronix compares the performance of the open-source Nouveau + NVK driver stack against NVIDIA’s proprietary 580 Linux driver across RTX 40 Ada and RTX 50 Blackwell GPUs (Linux Gaming/Graphics & Compu
https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-nvk-linux-618-mesa-26Open linkView original on lemmy.ml
2 replies
Nouveau is really only meant for compatibility, and that's all it was ever really designed for. The base driver struggles to play even the most basic accelerated games, but the NVK hook has a shocking amount of performance gain, considering. Once they get some memory optimizations and Cuda hooks in there, this could be a decent contender for not having to mess with Nvidia's module stack, honestly.
I disagree with that. The main problem is that Nouveau was stagnant for years because it just wasn't feasible to use since NVIDIA blocked reclocking support, so it would only ever run at its base clock, resulting in terrible performance. So nobody wanted to use the drivers, all that mattered is that they worked well enough to let users install the proprietary drivers.
But now that NVIDIA allows reclocking again, there's actual reason to improve the performance and fix bugs in it.